Film And Design 4: Art Deco Clips

70 Minute Running Time

Program 4: 1930’s Politics and Design
Featuring A Program Of Clips:“I’m Young and Healthy” from 42nd St. (Lloyd Bacon, 1933),
“Lullaby of Broadway” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, 1935)
“Never Gonna Dance” from Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)

The style known only since the 1960s as “art deco,” has become something of a cliché now, but in the 1920s and ‘30s “moderne” (or “international moderne” among its many names) stood for all things chic, sophisticated and hip – and not of earlier times. Deco can be playful and sexual; Busby Berkeley connected deco to militarism and parodies of militarism; “Hitler’s filmmaker” Leni Riefenstahl and others turned it to fascism and worse.